Two outhouses

My mom and dad, when I was still only 5 years old, were by no means the poorest people in town. Only when they decided to sell the family business—a prosperous grain and lumber operation—so that Dad could go to seminary and study for the ministry, did we move out of one of the more modern homes in Holland, Iowa, and toward a series of houses where indoor plumbing was a rarity.

Outdoor plumbing meant outhouses. No running water to rinse your hands after using the toilet. No little packs of scented wipes; there were plenty of pages in last year’s Sears catalog. And every few months, outdoor plumbing meant digging a new hole, moving the two-holer outhouse over it, and filling in the top of the original site. Once in a while, it also meant countering the pranksters by going out the morning after Halloween and helping lift the outhouse back up to its original position.

Yes, both sexes used the outhouse. I’m coming back to that issue in a bit. But I offer this historical background so you know I’m not just being culturally squeamish about the topic. I’ve been there. We all knew enough to knock politely and listen for someone’s “Just a minute!” or “Privacy, please.”

But such was not the case at the South Cono country school, where I did my fourth-grade studies. There were 18 of us in the K-8 program. Common sense taught us that when recess time came, all 18 couldn’t get through a single two-hole outhouse. Common sense also taught us that even a poor little country school could afford two outhouses. And what more natural way to divide them than by sending the boys to one and the girls to the other? No seats-up or seats-down controversies that way!

What won’t work is the blatant denial that God created us male and female, and then called that very good.

But now, of course, we live in much more sophisticated times. That’s why major cities like Houston, Texas, Jacksonville, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., have been wracked with controversy over policies governing access to public or semipublic restrooms. Charlotte’s City Council approved a measure, due to become law on April 1, which by any sensible reading will make sex-specific restrooms illegal. To include “locker rooms” and “showers,” of course, as the ordinance does, undresses the measure still one more incredible step.

The language is clear: Under the new Charlotte policy, anyone who thinks of himself as a female (regardless of his anatomy) should have access to women’s facilities of all kinds, while anyone who thinks of herself as a male should be free to use men’s facilities. Or, vice versa—whatever that means. So wouldn’t it be something, some have asked, if the new North Carolina policies were found to govern not just courts, schools, YMCA facilities, and Charlotte’s international airport—but, yes, churches as well, and why not the highly popular Billy Graham Library?

The debate in North Carolina, if you listen only to the mainstream media, comes across as trivial or even goofy. Policymakers started by trying to meet the demands of a relatively small group of gender-uncertain people—but have learned that identifying anybody and everybody in this gender-confused era is political quicksand. Gov. Pat McCrory told The Associated Press that the controversial city law “denies privacy rights for people who expect to share restrooms or locker rooms only with people born with the same anatomy.” He called it “an extreme regulation that changes the basic norms of society.”

But the big worry isn’t about the durability of the Graham museum. I had enough experience as a child to know we can probably get along OK with shared outhouses, even if we’ve brought them indoors. Common sense can prevail there just as it did at my home when I was 5 years old, and even a few years later at the South Cono public school and its pair of outhouses.

What should deeply concern us is the constant rejection of God’s creation order. What won’t work is the blatant denial that God created us male and female, and then called that very good. And that is no merely superficial issue in a few designated buildings in North Carolina. It is a blasphemy that will corrupt, and is already corrupting, our whole culture. And what we leave for the generations to come will be far more putrid than anything under an Iowa outhouse.

Email jbelz@wng.org